Lit by Mary Karr Page A

construction in the summer to feed his four kids. My thesis advisor, Louise, baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants. Heather had one slender volume and was better known for her wicked pool moves. Frank played jazz piano in a Boston bar on weekends. Ray had almost won a big prize for the dog-eared paperback of stories I’d been hauling around, but he still crashed in a sleeping bag on my floor when he was in Minneapolis. Two brothers, Toby and Geoffrey, hadn’t published their memoirs yet. A poet named Ellen Byant Voigt had gathered up this crew about five years before they started dragging Pulitzers and presidential awards and genius grants in their wake.
    Easily the least prepared person to study with this august—if not yet anointed—company, I drank like a fish during residencies. Classes ran all day. Parties went till dawn, and I got to hear storytellers of the first order practice their craft. Ray described how the bankruptcy lawyer he’d stiffed of a fee had taken him to small claims court to try to get custody of Ray’s dog. The outraged judge had said, You’re gonna take this man’s dog?
    Back in Minneapolis, the only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober, which meant living like a nun. Going nowhere booze was served, I slid as if on a greased track between apartment and library and whatever teaching I could scrape up. No more bartending—the temptation to drink would’ve kept me blotto—no more pogoing to punk bands. The one art opening I slipped into for a glance around turned into a three-day binge.
    After a few years’ work, I’d reached the final meeting with my thesis supervisor—the Resident Genius, I called her—in a chic French restaurant I’d saved up to take her to. She was an elegant woman with a ballerina’s slim poise and the ability to run a demitasse spoon around a china cup without looking callow. I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals, telling her all I needed was the right publisher. (How did I dare? I now think.)
    I swear, I said, it’s like the magazines installed a machine at mypost office that recognizes my address, yanks the poems out, then stuffs them in the return envelope.
    Count yourself lucky, she said. You’re still promising until your first book’s out.
    It was dawning on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be happy.
    Setting her spoon down, she said, Don’t worry, she said, You don’t have that choice —which either knighted or blighted me, I’ll never know which.

PART II
Flashdance
    “So, Papa, are you feeling good now that you’re in my hands?”
    “No,” Papa said, “I’m feeling bad.”
    Then Semyon asked him, “And my brother Fyodor, when you were hacking him to pieces, did he feel good in your hands?”
    “No,” Papa said, “Fyodor was feeling bad.”
    Then Semyon asked him, “And did you think, Papa, that someday you might be feeling bad?”
    “No,” Papa said, “I didn’t think I might be feeling bad.”
    —Isaac Babel, “The Church in Novgorod”

6
Inheritance Tax Summer
    We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Lafe’s sack. Because I said will I or wont I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack was full when we get to the woods it wont be me…. If the sack is full, I cannot help it .
    —William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
    T he young poet I’ll wind up marrying tours my grad school for a week. Rumor has it, he’d been the star of genius Robert Lowell’s last class at Harvard. Drawn by his shy smile and decorous bearing, I right off start getting to the cafeteria early so as to slide my tray next to his and sit in the scent of detergent he gives off.
    Afternoons, we walk through the woods to a sandy stretch of beach